Refugee stories

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Since arriving in Melbourne on Saturday and wandering through the Central Business District, I couldn’t help but notice a few signs that said, “We welcome all refugees.” Though it is up for debate whether Australia is more welcoming to refugees than the United States, particularly in an age of Trumpism where bigotry and racism have been reawakened across the globe, it is comforting to see a sign that at least appears to acknowledge that there are innocent, well-meaning, and hard-working people struggling in war-torn countries today that need a home in a safer, happier place. Not everyone believes the fake news that all refugees are potential terrorists looking to leech off of “free handouts.”

I’ve also been doing some research for the few days we will be spending in Adelaide this week, and I noticed the immigrant stories on some of the restaurant websites. One of them was especially heart-warming, describing a couple who migrated from Afghanistan with their young family in the late 1980s during the height of the Cold War. As is common with many immigrants to a new country, they didn’t see much that resembled the foods that they loved to eat, so they opened their own restaurant in 2009 to share with Adelaide an authentic piece of the Afghan culture that they left behind. Their website reads:

“At Parwana we believe that even loss and suffering can forge beauty and generosity. It is in this spirit that diners at Parwana are welcomed like guests into a home, and treated to the culinary pleasures of age-old secrets of genuine Afghan cooking, hinting at the glory of the country the family once knew.”

If you ask any American, Afghanistan is not on anyone’s “bucket list” for travel. It has a dark gash over it with an ongoing war there, with heavy U.S. involvement. When people hear the name of this country, they immediately think of Osama bin Laden or the Taliban, of the terrorist attacks of 9/11. And for the conservatives of the U.S., for which there are many, they likely believe that almost anyone from Afghanistan is a potential terrorist. So a story like the one shared above is lost, reduced down to nothing and forgotten, the stories of most immigrants families who leave their home countries, their places of familiarity, seeking out a better life and future for their children and their children’s future children. It’s tragic because it’s a culture like most Central Asian and Middle Eastern cultures that embraces family gatherings, guests being welcomed into a home, and delicious food.

And, this isn’t any surprise, but this restaurant is on our list.

Asian everything

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Every time I’ve come back to Melbourne over the last six years, it feels more and more Asian to me. It doesn’t seem to matter what neighborhood we are in or what block we’re walking along, but there is inevitably yet another noodle or dumpling spot, many of which are chains from China or Taiwan or Malaysia. They have have both Chinese or Vietnamese or Thai writing in addition to English. The food always looks authentic and beautiful. And there’s always Caucasians ordering the “right” dishes at the restaurants when we pass by and I take a quick peek through the windows.

And then lo and behold, as we were walking through Melbourne’s Central Business District today, I noticed Happy Lemon, a popular chain of “salted cheese” milk tea drinks that originated in Shanghai that has hundreds of locations around Asia and the world now. They have a location in Flushing in New York, but not yet in Manhattan. And in the Bay Area when my two friends introduced me to it, it’s located in Berkeley, not in San Francisco. This is their first location in Oceania.

It’s overwhelming in a delicious way. I want to eat everything.

The jealous mother persists

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My parents knew I was spending Christmas with Chris’s family, but I had to remind my mom over the phone a couple days ago that we were leaving late this week. Work has been pretty busy over the last several weeks, especially since I’ve been trying to schedule all of next week’s external calls this week to save myself some odd working hours given the time difference. But nevertheless, my mother was annoyed and obviously jealous as she usually is.

“Well, if work is so busy, then why are you taking time off?” she said, clearly unhappy with me and wanting to find a reason for me not to go on this trip.

“I planned this in advance, and I’ll still actually be working while I’m in Australia all of next week,” I responded. It didn’t matter that I told her in a previous breath that I would be home for about 11 days in February, spending both weekends at the house with her. It’s never going to be enough, especially since she’s already deemed Chris’s parents the enemy. Yet, she happens to love Chris’s aunt and uncle on his dad’s side and insisted that I tell them she and my dad said hello. But very transparently, she did not say the same thing for Chris’s parents. How very subtle of her.

It really would never matter what Chris’s parents did or did not do; she’d find a way to vilify them and make them seem evil.

 

Holiday party drama that I missed

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At the time my office’s holiday party was supposed to begin tonight, Chris and I departed JFK for the first leg of our flight to Melbourne. We arrived at LAX just after the party ended, and as I turned my Airplane Mode off on my phone, my phone buzzed with text message alerts from multiple colleagues, all telling me that I missed the most ridiculous drama at the sit-down dinner that evening. They both ended up calling me to recount the horrors of the evening while our plane was still on the tarmac, waiting for our gate to open up (which ended up taking nearly two hours).

One colleague became so drunk that she couldn’t even walk properly and had to have the restaurant call her a cab to get back to her hotel. A colleague’s husband, apparently jealous of all the men she works with in our office, punched one of my male colleagues upon meeting him, and then interrupted another colleague’s mini speech to yell out that he wanted another male colleague to stop calling his wife at 7:30am on weekdays. This same husband hit on multiple female colleagues, including one new hire who started just this week, and attempted to kiss one of my female teammates on her lips before she backed away.

I am not sure whether I would have wanted to be there or not. I originally felt a bit sad that I’d be missing our office holiday party since last year’s was pretty enjoyable. I like the fact that our office is relatively small, less than 25 people, which means that when you add the plus ones in, it’s a nice, intimate crowd where you can actually talk to the people you want to talk to over the course of five-plus hours. But after hearing about all this tense and awkward nonsense that compelled colleagues who live in a day and age where texting reins, yet they still felt compelled to call me, I think it was actually better I was on a flight headed west watching Crazy Rich Asians. It was fake drama instead of real-life drama I could watch.

Volunteering time is not enough.

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I’m organizing a team volunteer event for January and have been spending time looking into new organizations to lend our time to. One of the most recent ones caught me a bit off guard when they asked that in addition to the time we’d be donating to this organization that they also requested a $75/volunteer fee to cover the meal costs of the food we’d be delivering to senior citizens.

Granted, I am aware that we’re volunteering as a corporate entity, but it just leaves a slightly bad taste in my mouth that they believe our time is not valuable enough, and that in addition to our time, they want our money, as well. If we are going to the trouble of spending business hours volunteering to alleviate them of labor responsibilities, can’t they find the funds to actually supply the food we would be delivering? I have been looking for nonprofits for my company to support for the last year and a half, and it is disheartening to me that many of them expect to get free everything instead of just our free time, which really is not free. I understand that they face a shortage of both funds and labor resources. If I weren’t empathetic to this, I would not be leading volunteer and charitable activities for my office. But to require us to provide both seems excessive. So, I told them this over email, and they consented that our hours would be enough.

Yes, because otherwise, I’d keep looking.

A hairstylist and a therapist in one, and women’s lib

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Although I had a 5:30 cut and color appointment with my colorful and vibrant hairstylist today, I was delayed by over half an hour because the person she was working on before me was going through a very long and nasty divorce… and we all had to hear about it, everyone within a 15-20 foot radius of my hairstylist’s chair. They were married over 24 years, no children. She said she was in her mid-50s, in a lucrative career where she’d soon have to be paying her husband alimony payments as a result of her higher salary.

“He’s set to inherit over $5 million when his mom dies… granted, it probably won’t be for another 10 or so years, but he will be set!” this soon-to-be-divorced woman exclaimed loudly. “Yet I, because I earn more money than he does, I have to pay him alimony! That women’s lib… it’s a bunch of bullshit! Women thought they were going to be better off, to work and be men’s ‘equals.’ Well, here you go: you want equality? Then you have to pay your ex-husband alimony if you make more money! Is that what you want?” 

She was going off, saying that it would have been better to just be a stay-at-home wife, with basically no job opportunities. Because this way, if she went on this route, she’d be getting payments from her husband today.

I had so many things I could have said to her, but I decided that I wanted her out of there ASAP because she was already delaying me over half an hour, and I did not want her delaying me even further. Did she really think she’d have this lucrative career if the women’s liberation movement never happened?! 

She eventually left. My hairstylist looked at me apologetically. “I’m so sorry,” she said to me as she hugged me. “What can I do? She needs someone to listen to her who is unbiased… I can’t just kick her out.

“You’re basically a therapist and a hairstylist in one,” I said to her, smiling. “Except… maybe you should be charging therapist rates on top of your cut and color rates?”

It had never occurred to me to ever vent or rant about life’s frustrations to my hairstylist, or really anyone who did a service for me, whether it was a haircut, a massage, a mani/pedi, or anything. When I used to see a Japanese stylist for my haircuts in the East Village, they were practically expressionless mutes who never said anything to me other than asking what I wanted, if I would like more green tea, or if I wanted a blowout. With my current hairstylist, we just talk about random things like work, travel, our families, and most recently, our cultures and upbringings. But ranting? It seems too much to ask of a hairstylist. Don’t they have enough of their own problems that they shouldn’t be made to listen to ours?

At least I saw this divorcee give my stylist a fat tip. It’s the least she could have done for all her venting and free therapy.

 

Becoming

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A few days ago, I started listening to the Audible version of Michelle Obama’s book Becoming, which she narrates, and it’s even more amazing and down-to-earth than I ever could have imagined. For someone who is so accomplished from a working-class background in the South Side of Chicago, it is so hard to imagine the people who choose to criticize and hate her. The story of her childhood certainly is a working class one, no matter what anyone wants to twist and ask, “how can she be ‘working class’ if she went to Harvard and Princeton and is now a multi-millionaire”? Not everyone who is wealthy and successful today came from wealth the way President Dipshit did. If anyone bothered really listening or reading her story, they’d know for a fact that she had no privileged upbringing at all, unless you want to define “privilege” as living in an in-law of an apartment in a working-class neighborhood and having one parent working a city-job.  She barely left her city, much less her state, until she got to high school and had an opportunity to go to Paris for a school trip, and even that, she wanted to deprive herself of that because of the guilt around how much her parents would need to spend on this trip just for her to do what the other kids in her class did. That sounds like what I’ve done with my parents a few times… except in her case, her parents wanted her to go and paid for her to go. In my case, I didn’t go.

I’ve really come to the conclusion that people who choose to hate Michelle Obama do it simply because they a) hate women, b) hate black people, or really, any people of color, c) hate it when people from relatively humble backgrounds are able to rise through the ranks and become successful and wealthy, or even d) don’t want children (who are poor or of color) to be literate and educated, or want to prevent them from eating nutritious foods. There is little to nothing to dislike her for.

The portraits that the right-wing media paint of her being elitist or angry are rooted in racism and bigotry, designed to paint her as “other” simply because she is a black woman who has strived to achieve the same things that white men and women have always wanted, but because she is black, she is apparently undeserving of her success compared to them (Ted Cruz was Harvard educated, but why does no one ever accuse him of being “elitist”? Oh, it’s because he’s white and male. He just deserves that. Plus, Republicans swim in elitism but just leave out their education from their oppressive political rhetoric. Going to Harvard for Ted Cruz is not elitist — it makes him more qualified. Going to Harvard for Michelle Obama is elitist because she didn’t really deserve it). As a black woman, she has never had the same “status” in society as a white woman would, so it so unfair to accuse her of being “angry” or “entitled.” Why is she angry — because she isn’t shy about discussing and confronting racism and sexism, things that obviously still persist that so many people refuse to acknowledge or do anything about, which is why Trump is so popular and is now the leader of the U.S.? If that’s how you want to define angry, then anyone sane who wants progress for society should be called angry, including me.

Reading this book is really hard in many ways knowing who has succeeded Barack and Michelle in the White House. “Was America really ready for a black president?” Michelle asked in her book. It seemed they were for eight years, but after that, America grew angry and said, fuck this, we’re going to elect a racist, I’ve-inherited-my-wealth-but-refuse-to-admit-it to the White House to prove to the U.S. that we’re just as racist as we always were, but now, we’ll make it more acceptable with the example Dipshit is setting.

Christmas cards 2018

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As part of my nearly annual tradition for years now, I handmade a subset of my Christmas cards that I am sending out. This year, I made 16 for close friends and family and spent most of today baking and writing messages in them, getting them ready for either hand delivery or for mailing out.

As I sorted through all the different designs and laid them out to take photographs of them, it suddenly hit me that it had been many years since I first made a handmade card for Ed. It had been years since I had sent him any Christmas card. And the piercing memory of coming back to the house and going through the belongings in his desk after his death in July 2013 hit me: the moment when I opened his second desk drawer to find several years’ worth of my handwritten and handmade cards I’d given to him, neatly stacked in a short, single pile. I remember immediately tearing up, reading each message I wrote him one by one. And in a slight fit of rage, I tore all of them up and threw them into the recycling bin. Maybe I should have kept them. Maybe I should have preserved them to remember what I used to write to my Ed with pen and paper. But my emotions got the best of me and they’re now all gone.

He only kept my cards. He kept them because he knew I wanted him to. He actually listened to what I said. Each Christmas, it’s hard to forget how much Ed loved Christmas — all the lights, the trees, the smell of Christmas cooking and baking, the idea of togetherness in even a dysfunctional family. He isn’t here with me anymore, but each Christmas, I think of him constantly, both fondly and sadly, and hope that he is happier in a better and more peaceful place, celebrating Christmas in his own way somewhere above us.

Exceptions

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I was sitting at the very first unagi (eel)-based restaurant that has opened in New York City today with Chris and our two friends at lunch today, and we were talking in general about people who are picky eaters and not. Chris was spending time hating on vegans and vegetarians, saying their lives suck because they are consciously making the choice to deprive themselves. Our female friend was critiquing quinoa, saying it’s tasteless and when it does have a taste, it seemed off or stale. Our other friend, who is this woman’s husband, gave me a sly look, saying he knows for a fact that if anything comes out of his mouth that he claims he doesn’t like that my response will be to turn him on it immediately and prove him wrong. He recounted a time not too long ago when he insisted to me that he wasn’t a fan of Indian or North African spices — so he meant spices like cumin, coriander. So I made a North-African spiced red lentil soup and asked him to come over and try it. Not only did he like it, but he actually loved it and was tempted to have a second serving.

It’s not that I cannot handle rejection or the fact that everyone has at least a short list of things they refuse to eat (I have yet to be turned on regular mainstream Heinz ketchup and will very likely spend the rest of my life refusing to touch it). It’s more that I feel that most of the time when people say they do not like something, it’s because they’ve had a bad version of it. That’s how I was, once upon a time, with things like organ meat or congealed blood. So I think it’s more about the tolerance of increasing one’s exposure to foods and trying to approach foods with an open mind, even if you think you do not like it.

What is also amusing is when people hate on picky eaters’ choices of things they do not like, but then do not call out their own. Our friend was appalled that one of my good friends hates shrimp and refuses to eat it (well, when she knows she is eating it), but she was completely fine when I said she used to have an aversion to oysters. We always make exceptions for the things we agree with, don’t we?

Rockefeller Christmas tree

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Every Christmas season, as we gradually approach the day we are departing for Australia (or, last year, the UK and South Africa) to celebrate Christmas with Chris’s family, Chris and plan a special dinner out from our curated Yelp list, and then, we will have our annual “trip” to visit the Rockefeller Christmas tree. Yes, it’s touristy. Yes, it’s crowded as hell with both tourists and locals. But it’s our thing, our annual Christmas time tradition. And this year, I really did not want to go tonight. It was so cold and windy, and I felt cranky and irritable from the cold weather as well as the chaos and busy-ness of work and catching up from traveling this week. But when we actually arrived at the tree, all the complaining in my head stopped. It really is a spectacular sight every year. I get why people want to come to New York during the holiday period to see all the Christmas lights and experience the festivities. There’s something really magical about seeing this insanely tall and fat tree lit up with what is probably thousands of colorful lights that flanks the Rockefeller Center. When I saw this tree tonight, I thought… wow. I’m really lucky to live in this city that others marvel over, that others travel thousands of miles for just to see this freaking tree. There is really nothing quite like New York City.